


The Performance Of Sleep

by Pink_Siamese



Category: Twilight - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-03
Updated: 2010-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-13 01:19:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pink_Siamese/pseuds/Pink_Siamese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A master of dream-watchers could read the contents of a dream through the subtle communications of skin, breath, and the fluttering movement of the eyelids. He could smell the turn and turn-about chemical dance unfolding in the veins. Mastery requires at least two hundred years of constant study and he is not a master. He is an acolyte, an apprentice, a dilettante."</p><p>My attempt at a Twilight fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Performance Of Sleep

He likes to watch them sleep.

It is a small pleasure, an innocent one, that he takes most nights following a hunt; a human would think watching such a mundane thing would be boring, but humans are unaware of many things. The shortness of their lives renders them incapable of appreciating the finer nuances of the performance of sleep. Life at mortal speed is too fast, too hot, too chaotic; they cannot slow down enough to perceive the minute shifts in breathing, the contented murmur of resting organs, the unwinding of muscles. The body’s ritual as it descends into sleep pales in comparison to the sight of a living person entering a dream. The bones stir and the skin comes alive, the body elegant in its paralysis while all of the things it is longing for swim through a languid stream flowing just beneath the surface. A master of dream-watchers could read the contents of a dream through the subtle communications of skin, breath, and the fluttering movement of the eyelids. He could smell the turn and turn-about chemical dance unfolding in the veins. Mastery requires at least two hundred years of constant study and he is not a master. He is an acolyte, an apprentice, a dilettante.

He misses dreaming.

The fantasies of young women consumed him in the first years following his turning, when the ability to listen into the minds of the living burst open inside of him. So much noise, so much discontent and secretly nurtured pleasures left warm and fertile inside the darkest parts, as if there was some part of those souls that could sense creatures like him. Those things are tucked away, and it is nothing for him to follow them down into the darkness and wait and listen for the humid whispers beneath the shrill declamations and bold entreaties. When the other voices grow tired, the silken ones do not. They become more of themselves, growing soft in their desire, reaching out toward the merest hope of fulfillment. He marvels at how much these fantasies have changed and how little: the longing for tremulous kisses, craving light touches in intimate places, burning for a surrender to their deepest selves unlocked by the skillful fingers of a lover. Sleeping Beauty, awakened by a kiss and carried over the threshold of her conventional life, into a moist new world swollen with breathless pleasure.

 _This one…would she like it if I woke her now? If I lowered my face to hers and inhaled the spicy flower-petal fragrance of her blood? Would she crave my kiss? Would she throw off the shackles of fear and of sleep and touch my cheek? Would she place my cold hand upon her breast?_

The deer’s blood starts to fade. Before the hunger can take hold he’s back on the street, moving away from the high bedroom window.

*          *          *

Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, no warning, just a snap out of the muddy depths. She climbs out of bed and walks over to the window, her eyes taking in the shadows and light scattered among the trees, trying to excavate the dream. She thinks if she can remember the dream, she’ll know what woke her up. All of this she thinks while looking out the window, the tips of her fingers resting on the glass, and sometimes she wants to open the window even if it’s winter because the air will come into the room and bring with it the scent of her forgotten dreams.

 _Reconstitute me_ , she thinks, and wonders where the words come from. They feel like letters from a foreign land.

She always thinks about Edward. She imagines him in her room, keeping close to the corner, maybe so the darkness falls across him just the right way, maybe so she wouldn’t notice him if she turned over and opened her eyes. She wonders if these thoughts have their roots in her elusive dreams. She stands at the window and thinks about Edward in her room, Edward looking at the curves of her body beneath the blankets, and her skin warms up to the mental image. Her breath comes a little faster and fogs the window pane. She resists the urge to draw something girlish in the fog and goes back to bed.

Under the covers, she closes her eyes and imagines Edward’s hands on her ankles, sliding up to her thighs, moving her knees apart like the doors to a fortress abandoned by its keepers and left to the wandering ravages of the night; deep in her dungeons are moaning prisoners chained to the walls. She is a moaning prisoner trapped inside her own flesh. _Touch me_ , she thinks, unaware of her thought because all of her awareness, all of her breath is funneled down into the hard tightness of her clit. _Eat me_ , she thinks, her clit caught between her sliding fingertips; she imagines his hands on her thighs, his face lowering into her cunt, his tongue cleaving her lips, one long strong lick, oh yes, oh, just like that.

She drips back into sleep. The chains inside grow still.

*          *          *

The next day he’s in biology class. He’s been gone for a couple of days and Bella watches him as she approaches the table they share, her body language tight and secretive, and when she slides her books onto the table there’s an inherent grace to the movement of her arms, an inviting tension in her muscles. Every inch of her flesh whispers _look at me_ , and so he does. He watches her lower her rump into the chair, watches her spine settle and her thighs pull the chair up to the edge of the table. She takes the biology book and opens it up, glancing at him out of the corners of her eyes as she does it, leaving the hair in place that falls against her cheek. Her head tilts up and turns, shifting the hair away with its momentum, and she returns his gaze until the rising scent of her blood becomes too much. He’s aware of her quickened heartbeat, the staccato labor of that moist red muscle to push the blood closer to the surface of her skin. It warms into a luscious flush. He scoots the chair toward the far end of the table. He takes his biology book and opens it, looking down at the diagrams of plant cells.

Bella writes on the corner of her notebook and pushes it over: _Hey_.

Edward glances it. He looks up at her, catches her watching him, and gives her a broad smile. Her heart skips a beat, speeds up, and he feels all of this like thunder, smells it like the rising mist of a hard rain. She smiles back and its slow, starting at one corner, tucking a little so its sly to begin with, then self-conscious, then widening into an invitation written out just for him. The temptation to rest his teeth on her neck is terrifying, excruciating; just to place the edges of his teeth on her skin and wrestle with the longing to bite would be the sweetest kind of agony. He thinks about how long it would take to get up and bar the door, to break the necks of all the others in this room; how long it would take for him to make them alone and how the scent of her fear would open its iron petals in her veins and how the tangy edges would sharpen his lust. She notices the change in his breathing, but he’s not sure if she notices it consciously; her own quickens to his pace and falls into it, so all he hears is one great rush of breath on the inside and outside of his ears.

He picks up his pen and writes back: _Hey. I’m Edward_.

*          *          *

Bella sits at the lunch table and watches him walk in and go to where he sits with his siblings, and when she thinks he’s looking at her she waves her fingers at him. She thinks she catches a little smile in return but before long he’s sitting at the table and his back is turned to her. She admires his back for a moment and wishes she could admire his forearms instead; she likes their elegant shape and that they already have a fine layer of dark hair on them. She thinks about the texture of those hairs, how it would feel to touch the slight hollows between the cords on the inside of his wrist.

*          *          *

He imagines the conversation:

 _What if I’m not the superhero? What if I’m the bad guy?_

 _I don’t care_ , he imagines her saying, though he knows it would probably be more like _you’re fucking crazy, man, I don’t think you’re a superhero or a vampire, I think you’re probably full of shit and just trying to get into my pants_. And then he imagines her saying _but that’s cool with me. Let’s go do it._

He tries again: _What if I’m not the superhero? What if I’m the bad guy?_

He sees her wide eyes, her softening mouth. _Turn me, Edward. Then we can fuck like beasts. Do you like it when it hurts?_

He sits in the bathroom stall and stops imagining the conversation. He imagines something else, and when he’s finished he’s able to go back to class and concentrate.

*          *          *

That night she doesn’t do herself before falling asleep. She curls up in bed and thinks about him and plays with her nipples and warms herself up a little and then waits to drift off into sleep. She prays that she’ll dream about him and that she won’t wake up before the good stuff. She hopes that she’ll remember every detail, that when she comes out of sleep it will be with a throat full of throbbing breath, her thighs squeezed tight around her sensitive cunt to hold all the pleasure inside.

*          *          *

She is asleep. Edward is there to watch her dream.

 


End file.
